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Ralph Raico delivers an excellent lecture on the origins of World War I. Truly illuminating stuff. I have watched only the first hour so far. The remainder covers the Great Depression and World War II.
I was particularly struck by Raico's observation [beginning at time mark 01:04:40] that Kerensky, head of the moderate democratic government that succeeded the tsarist regime in 1917, refused to fulfil the one condition the Russian people demanded of their government: peace - an outcome under which Lenin would never have gained control. Kerensky claimed that he couldn't make peace because this would have meant betrayal of "valued allies". In truth, he was eager for the spoils of war agreed in the secret treatises of 1915: uncontested reign of the Black Sea, Constantinople, the Istanbul Strait, control of the Eastern Mediterranean - in a word: an enhanced imperial position.
For similar reasons, beginning to shop around among the opposing camps in 1915, the Italian government finally settled for the promises of the British and French, sacrificing 900 000 Italians in hopes of imperialist expansion in Trieste, South Tirol, as well as parts of southern Turkey.
World War I happened because the major contestants had embarked upon ambitious imperialist policies that would soon develop a dynamic of their own, sucking them eventually into an inevitable war, whose cause is not so much the villainy of a single party but the evil logic of entangled imperialistic threats and ambitions.
Also consider this thought-provoking piece on 10 WW I myths. Had Keynes got it wrong, once again, claiming the Versailles treaty was inordinately harsh on the Germans?
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